Introduction

1One of the key inspirations for the Nagoya Protocol, building on the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), was the pioneering Declaration of Belém, issued in 1988 by the International Society of Ethnobiology. The CBD, cited as a landmark text by many researchers, was designed to improve access to biological resources while promoting their reasonable protection and enhancement, by means of a mechanism for fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilisation of genetic resources. This tool has since been transposed into national legislation, leading to any number of disappointments which appear to owe as much to the nature of the objects in question as they do to the divergent interests of the groups involved in the application of the mechanism. It is, in fact, the culmination of a long process of negotiations (first at the international, and subsequently at the national level) between politicians, the private sector, the academic world and NGOs, all involved to varying extents depending on the national and political contexts.

2France, like all members of the European Union, was obliged to transpose the Nagoya Protocol (signed in 2011 and ratified in 2016) into national legislation. In order to fulfil the country’s international commitments, and in accordance with the French Constitution, legislators produced two texts to a fairly tight deadline: Law No. 2016-1087 of 8 August 2016 “for the Reconquest of Biodiversity, Nature and Landscapes” (the Law on Biodiversity - see Focus 3) and its corresponding implementing decree No. 2017-848 date 9 May 2017. Some of the terminology and expressions used in these texts raise important questions. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the narrative of the debates and consultations involved, in an attempt to put the positions of the different groups into perspective (Aubertin, 2018; Bourdy et al., 2017), we instead propose to focus on the definitions and their application in the specific case of French Guiana, and in doing so to illustrate the complexity of “traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources” along with some of the inconsistencies and paradoxes which have emerged from this legislative initiative.

3French Guiana is an overseas department defined in Article 73 of the French Constitution, and the principle of legislative identity means that it is possessed of the same legislative arsenal as metropolitan France (Mélin-Soucramanien, 2012). In addition to its rich biodiversity, two of the defining features of this territory are the presence of indigenous peoples, as per the definition used in the CBD (Aubertin et al., 2007), and the wealth of natural expertise found among Guiana’s various cultural groups (Fleury et al., 2014; Grenand et al., 2004; Ogeron et al., 2018). There is also a certain degree of political defiance from some stakeholders with regard to France’s metropolitan decision-making centres, partly as a result of the State’s excessively Jacobin approach to implementing its laws, sometimes ill-suited to the realities of the overseas territories. This delicate political context, which makes enforcing the new law difficult, is not helped by the law’s lack of precision on the concepts employed.

4The ambition for this paper is to highlight this imprecision, and where possible to propose theoretical clarifications of certain concepts. Starting with the key definitions of the French law which transposed the Nagoya Protocol into national legislation, considered from an anthropological and ethnobiological perspective, we discuss the relevance of the choices made, the pitfalls likely to beset the enforcement of the law and the reasons underlying them. In the process, we address a number of key questions:

1. Who owns the knowledge envisaged by this law? We address the notion of communautés d’habitants, the scope of such concepts, and the difficulties inherent to asserting ownership of knowledge;
2. What do we mean by knowledge relating to nature in Amazonia, and particularly in French Guiana? We consider the nature, temporality and evolution of such knowledge.

Who owns traditional knowledge?

5The Law on Biodiversity offers a brief definition of the communautés d’habitants likely to be in possession of traditional knowledge associated with resources: “Any community of people who traditionally derive their means of subsistence from the natural world, and whose way of life has implications for conservation and the sustainable use of biodiversity” (see Chap. 7).

The difficult task of defining a communauté d’habitants

6The notion first appears in a ministerial order of 1987 establishing a system of “collective usage right zones,” which specifies that the beneficiaries of these collective land reserves are those “communautés d’habitants who traditionally derive their means of subsistence from the forest,” a category of people whom the law struggles to define (Davy et al., 2016). The concept has since been taken up in various other legal texts, including the new Forestry Code of 2005, the National Parks Act of 2006, and Article 19 of the order establishing the Guiana Amazonian Park (PAG).

7One of the notable blind spots of this definition is its use of the term communauté d’habitants1 as a signified concept to define the properties of the signifier, a logical short-circuit which renders the whole enterprise ambiguous. Pinton & Grenand (2007) have already noted, with reference to the CBD, that Article 2 (Use of Terms) does not offer a definition of local communities or indigenous peoples. Furthermore, the concept of community is intrinsically vague, since the term may be used to refer to anything from a family unit to an ethnic group or village, or even to refer to more expansive collective sociological or cultural entities (Gossiaux, 1991). The very meaning of the term, and its appropriation by various social groups, has been the subject of much discussion in other areas of the social sciences and humanities (MacQueen et al., 2001).

8As per the implementing decree for this law, in the Guianese context the term communauté d’habitants specifically refers to “Amerindian and Bushinenge” groups living at a remove from urban centres. The executive order establishing the PAG also adopts this definition of communautés d’habitants, thus excluding the Creole people of Saül. Some have decried this as a flagrant injustice to those rural Creole communities engaged in hunting, fishing and even slash-and-burn farming, although their numbers are dwindling.

9The rationale behind this distinction between Amerindians and Bushinenge (a good number of whom now live in urban areas in and around Cayenne, Kourou and Saint-Laurent) and Guianese Creole people living in the same circumstances is rarely apparent. Creole and Maroon societies, which are not considered indigenous under the UN definition, nonetheless have a shared history of deportation and enslavement.

10It seems clear enough that this is a way for the State to tacitly recognise the existence of indigenous peoples, or at least to attempt to transcribe this concept into French law. The implication of this decision was that Creole communities were not entitled to claim rights over their own forms of knowledge, and the resentment in Guiana was palpable. This approach is obviously informed by international treaties according specific rights to indigenous peoples and minorities, but it is still entirely legitimate to question its distinction between the knowledge held by indigenous peoples and that associated with other rural communities (in both Guiana and metropolitan France) (Pinton & Grenand, 2007). The former are protected by a system of authorisations, while the latter are not. In light of the constitutional principle that all French citizens are equal before the law, this raises some legal difficulties.

11This interpretation thus appears to contradict the very first article of the French Constitution, which states that all French people are born equal. It is, however, consistent with the EROM Law2 and its creation of a Grand Customary Council of Indigenous American and Bushinenge populations, evidence of the French State taking another step towards recognising those whom it still officially refuses to call “indigenous” people.

12Returning to the use of the term community, there are two key sticking points in the Guianese context. Who defines this term? And how?

13We remain convinced that these points should have been discussed in advance with the cultural groups intended to benefit from the new legislation. This was certainly the wish of the Grand Customary Council (see Chap. 12), expressed in its final response to the Guiana Amazonian Park in September 2019. One of the major stumbling blocks which has beset this whole process is the methodology employed: French, or European, legislators imposing their views upon Guianese communities. There was no real effort made to consult different Indigenous American and Bushinenge peoples on the ground, in order to co-construct what we now call community-oriented protocols (see Chap.14).

14Another major limitation is the failure to consider groups based outside Guiana, Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia and the Pacific islands, since the law only covers the aforementioned territories. By way of an example, consider the shepherds of the Causses region, whose sheep help to maintain the orchid prairies (some varieties of orchids flourish on these limestone prairies, grazed by sheep) (O’Rourke, 2006), whose way of life undoubtedly has “implications for conservation and the sustainable use of biodiversity.” The same could be said of winegrowers in the Jurançon area, maintaining singular ecosystems on their limestone hillsides which would otherwise disappear. Without these communautés d’habitants, as per the definition adopted in the Law on Biodiversity, these habitats would be at risk. So why should they be prevented from demanding a special status?

15Indeed, the influence of past societies on any number of ecosystems has been extensively demonstrated by research in the field of historical ecology, from India to Amazonia and British Columbia to the Mediterranean basin (Balée, 2013; Blondel, 2006; Gadgil & Thapar, 1990; Lepofsky et al., 2017; Odonne et al., 2019). It is never easy to establish a baseline when it comes to “conservation of biodiversity,” not least because the concepts of “initial state” and “baseline” are themselves hard to define (Barlow et al., 2012; Beisner et al., 2003; Papworth et al., 2009).

What about individuality? The status of knowledge

16The fact that the legislation uses the expression “one or more communities” seems to imply that this law only applies at the community level. Does this exclude individual knowledge? Does the law consider that no knowledge in relation to genetic resources can be individually held within these communities? This question is not an anodyne detail, since the relationship between individual and collective knowledge, and the different levels of collective identity, are subjects of study and debate among ethnobiologists and anthropologists (Reyes-García et al., 2007 ; see Chap. 10).

17Distribution of knowledge may also be gendered (Torres-Avilez et al., 2016; Voeks, 2007). In Amazonia this is true of basket-weaving and the plants used to stun fish, considered to be primarily masculine activities, while knowledge of plants used to dye fabric or ease childbirth is a predominantly female concern. But this is not to say that there are not specialists with expertise in specific areas of biocultural heritage, and their technological, medical, hunting or agricultural dimensions. There is clear evidence of such specialisation, although it is certainly less present than in other, more hierarchically-structured societies. Among the Teko of French Guiana, for example, there are specialists in myth (baekwöt a’e kuwapat), medicinal plants (ka’a lewa), spiritual interactions (paze) and dance (polãzat). Rather than a dichotomy between specialist and generalist knowledge, what we actually find is a continuous spectrum ranging from individual knowledge to shared, community knowledge. A paze, for example, holds knowledge gleaned from interpersonal teaching, i.e. passed from master to student, but also derived from allied non-human entities; the latter is an example of personal, often inexpressible knowledge. Another example comes from the Zapara people in Ecuador, where dreams play a major role in the learning process (Bilhaut, 2011). At the other end of the spectrum, storytellers are repositories of knowledge which is community-owned, albeit subject to individual reappropriations and perpetual variations. This is essentially what Collomb (2018) argues when he asserts that the “questions raised by the Quassia amara affair also highlight the difficulty of identifying – in debates of this kind – who, collectively, knows what, or indeed of solidifying the idea of a specific individual or group as ‘holders of knowledge,’ and thus as the legitimate recipients of the benefits derived from the work done by researchers using this knowledge.”(see Box 1 Chap. 12).

Collectives with variable contours

18The question of how to delimit communities may also be approached from a diachronic perspective, since ethnohistorical research has clearly established that present-day communities are the result of a long series of reconstitutions and coalescences (Grenand et al., 2017). In southern Guiana, historical maps can be used to illustrate the gradual disappearance of different groups, who have in fact combined to form the three composite groups that live in the region today: Teko, Wayãpi and Wayana. Amazonia is a world in perpetual movement, although the speed of this movement was drastically accelerated by the European invasion. Furthermore, interactions between Amazonian and European cultures stretch back further than we sometimes imagine, and these influences raise further questions in terms of usage.

19Without wishing to overly simplify the issue of the origin of knowledge, the majority of Amazonian mythologies agree that virtually all knowledge of nature and associated techniques comes from other peoples, who may be human or non-human. This certainly applies to knowledge of vines containing fish toxins. A certain number of species, particularly from the Fabaceae family, and specifically the Lonchocarpus, Derris or Tephrosia genera, are used as toxins for fishing purposes (Moretti & Grenand, 1982): threshing these plants in the water releases a toxic substance which stuns the fish, making them easy to catch. According to Wayãpi oral history, these techniques, particularly those involving Lonchocarpus vines, were originally taught to them by capuchin monkeys (Grenand, 1982).

20Another example is provided by the reeds used in basket-weaving, known as arouman. For the Palikur people (Davy, 2011), the technique of weaving plants was learned from birds, specifically the yellow-rumped cacique. Moreover, knowledge of the two most commonly-used species of arouman was transmitted to them by the agouti and tapir respectively.

21All of these myths3 serve as metaphors highlighting the importance of the dissemination of techniques through exchanges and alliances with other clans and ethnic groups. Whether it represents historical reality or is more a projection of socially desirable interactions, this Amazonian ethos, which has been extensively discussed by anthropologists, illustrates the significance of exchange and alliance. Numerous studies have demonstrated instances of technical and artisanal complementarity between different groups. For example, there were long-standing networks of exchange spanning several hundreds of kilometres and involving dozens of groups: in the Guiana highlands, some of these networks stretched from Venezuela to Amapá (Dreyfus, 1992). We also know that on the Rio Negro in Brazil, and in Guiana too, some groups specialised in the production of manioc graters, others in the fabrication of feather headdresses, others in the training of hunting dogs and so on. All of these groups thus had their own forms of specialisation. The objects they produced travelled far and wide, and were subsequently imitated. It is therefore difficult to determine who owns the intellectual property rights to many Amazonian inventions. Furthermore, intellectual property is a very important issue in French law, and the system struggles to get to grips with these forms of knowledge and their transmission by dreams, mythical ancestors or non-human beings, and for which the notion of ownership needs to be approached differently (Pinton & Grenand, 2007).

Content and contours of knowledge

22Above and beyond the challenges involved in determining who owns knowledge, defining what it is they actually own is also a complex matter. We shall consider the definition given in the Law on Biodiversity of “traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources:” “[…] knowledge, innovations and practices relating to the genetic or biochemical properties of that resource, its use or its properties, which have been held historically and continuously by one or more of the communautés d’habitants mentioned in paragraph 4°, as well as any developments to these practices and knowledge which can be attributed to the communautés d’habitants.”

The nature of the objects in question

23This definition raises further questions as a result of its vagueness. The first potential sticking point is the nature of the objects in question.

24What does the law mean by innovations? Technical procedures? We might, for example, apply this definition to the preparation of the fruit of the açaí palm tree (Euterpe oleracea). This is a complex process similar to that required to transform bitter manioc (which is toxic) into an edible foodstuff. These processes, and many others, are excluded from the legal definitions on account of their cross-cultural reach. If this criterion serves to rule out knowledge which is too widely-shared, and which would require highly complex discussions, the fact remains that these are Amazonian collective inventions. This exclusion is undoubtedly advantageous from an industrial perspective, since projects to develop açaí palm operations in French Guiana, drawing upon long-established practices, would otherwise be considered akin to co-opting practices and innovations for mercantile ends (what some would call biopiracy).

25Next, what do we consider as properties? A speckled blue colour? A bitter flavour? Ability to fly? Size? In fact, it seems that any adjective applied to a biological resource can be considered a property of that resource. This has major implications for nomenclature and definitions, not to mention uses. In fact, the consequences extend to all fields of social sciences and humanities, from the most rigidly descriptive ethnography to the latest ethnosciences. As anybody who has spent any time with people in the Amazon will know, rarely does a conversation go by without mention of the size of a fish caught recently, the colour of a monkey spotted in the treetops, the ideal period to pick such and such a fruit, etc. Amazonian ways of life depend upon a tightly-woven tapestry of relations between the elements and entities which make up the world, in which man is just one player among many.

Temporality

26The second potential pitfall in these definitions is a matter of time. What does the law mean by “historically” held knowledge? Is fifty years enough? A hundred? Does this principle of longevity apply to all objects and knowledge? Oral societies evolve in remarkably dynamic ways, and the traceability of the knowledge they hold (its ontogenesis, to borrow a term from the analytical sciences) is a highly complex issue. It is difficult to even approach this issue without drawing upon inferences which are often hotly-debated, to the extent permitted by linguistics, archaeology and ethnohistory.

27On a more general note, it is the notion of tradition which should give us pause for thought. Pouillon (1991) defines it as “that part of the past which survives in the present, where it is passed on and remains active and accepted by those who receive it and, in turn, pass it on to future generations.” The anthropological literature on this subject is extensive, but clearly the legislators are not overly concerned with this corpus. We have known since the work of Hobsbawm & Ranger (2012), Latour (1991), Lenclud (1987) that it is a vain endeavour to attempt to distinguish between so-called “traditional” societies and what we might call “modern” or “historical” societies. Indeed, considering “traditional” populations, or people engaged in “traditional” activities, as distinct from other people is a highly sensitive subject in the 21^st century.4

28As an illustration of these temporal dynamics, the example of the plants used by the Wayãpi to treat leishmaniasis is informative. As we have demonstrated in a previous publication (Odonne et al., 2011), most of these plants had changed over the course of the preceding thirty years. Among the 38 plant species identified by our study in 2009, only one was used to treat the same condition thirty years previously. Among the mechanisms which may have contributed to this evolution in knowledge, we might cite: shifts in uses, for example a plant initially used to treat a skin condition may prove to be useful for a different skin condition; intercultural shifts, with plants exchanged between groups; and, finally, original creations and discoveries, since the Wayãpi experiment with the use of different plants on a daily basis.

29This knowledge is dynamic and constantly evolving. Indeed this highlights two of the great strengths of Amazonian societies: their capacity to adapt in complex environments, and their resilience in the face of changes which can often be brutal. But how can we establish the continuity of such knowledge, another key requirement of the law? Proving the continuity of material cultural is always a complex undertaking in a context defined by impermanence, a result of the fragility of so many Amazonian objects, so retracing the history of intangible heritage is a serious challenge. Should we simply take people at their word? Variations on the affirmation “my grandparents always did it this way” are heard time and time again in field surveys… In this case, how do we deal with secret or discreet knowledge?

30Last but not least, the idea of “developments of these practices and knowledge which can be attributed to the communautés d’habitants” also demands further attention. How do we define such developments to practices and knowledge? This formulation appears to reflect an intention to avoid excessively rigid definitions, taking into account the perpetual dynamism of local knowledge. But it also raises a number of new questions. Is the development of a practice not a practice in and of itself? Once again, the difficulty here is to situate such developments within a longer timeframe, with regard to knowledge of techniques within Amazonian societies. The contrast established between continuity and evolution is strange, if not paradoxical.

Transversality of knowledge and practices

31The latter point also raises the issue of the origins and movements of local knowledge through time, space and cultures. By excluding both “traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources which cannot be attributed to one or more communautés d’habitants” and “traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources whose properties are well-known and have been in regular, long-standing use outside of the communautés d’habitants sharing them” from the scope of ABS schemes, legislators seem intent on simplifying the benefit-sharing process for shared knowledge. But demonstrating the ownership, or non-ownership, of knowledge is a fiendishly tricky business. In the aforementioned study of plants used to combat leishmaniasis in Oiapoque (Odonne et al., 2011), we demonstrated that it could be reasonably assumed that around 60% of species used in 2010 were the fruit of exchanges of knowledge between cultural groups. As demonstrated with increasing frequency in the ethnobiological literature, such exchanges are the principal source of development in local knowledge (Delêtre et al., 2011; Díaz -Reviriego et al., 2016; Tareau, 2019; Tareau et al., 2019). It would also be useful to study the “cultural biogeography” of knowledge transmission in greater detail, in order to better understand the dynamics in play. However, somewhat paradoxically, these processes require complex authorisation processes. Indeed, comparative studies on a pan-Amazonian level generally run up against the paucity of available data (Odonne et al., 2017). Putting things into perspective, it seems highly likely that the volume of traditional knowledge shared beyond or between communautés d’habitants is much greater than generally assumed. Indeed this is one of the main findings of Tareau’s (2019) work on exchanges between cultural groups on the Guianese coast. Knowledge and species travel freely from one group to the next, and some cultural groups – in this case, Creole communities – occupy a key position within this system, acting as intermediaries between other cultures in Guiana. Tareau thus demonstrates that 75% of the medicinal plant species mentioned in his surveys were cited by at least 5 different cultural groups, with 31% cited by 10 of the 16 cultural groups interviewed (Tareau, 2019: 262). These figures give some idea of the significance of shared knowledge of medicinal plants, and in most cases it would be a vain endeavour indeed to attempt to ascribe knowledge of a particular plant to a specific community. The example of Quassia amara has become emblematic in French Guiana (Bourdy et al., 2017; see Box 1 in Chap. 12). In Tareau’s view, informed by extensive research, it appears that knowledge of this plant is not specific to any group in Guiana! It was probably introduced in 1772, and the neighbouring colony of Suriname exported 265 tonnes of it to Europe in 1869, to be used as a bitter tonic, malaria remedy and insecticide. It is still to this day the 5^th most-used medicinal plant on the Guiana coast, employed by 12 different cultural groups (Tareau, 2019). As such, and in spite of the ongoing controversy, if somebody were to commission a study into the anti-malarial properties of this well-known plant species, there would be no need to apply for authorisation because this “traditional knowledge [is] associated with genetic resources whose properties are well-known and have been in regular, long-standing use outside of the communautés d’habitants sharing them.” (Law on Biodiversity, 2016).

The eternal difficulty of observing change

32Linguistic science provides another means of reconstructing historical exchanges. The names of plants in the many languages spoken in Guiana (and beyond) bear witness to extensive cultural exchanges (Grenand, 1995). Consider the example of the Euterpe oleracea palm tree, known variously as: was (Palikur), wasey (Wayãpi), watsey (Teko), wassaïe (Guianese Creole), wasay (Kali’na), açaí (Brazilian Portuguese) and so on and so forth. The phonological similarities are evident, even to readers not well-versed in the subtleties of historical linguistics. The same can be said of the fish toxins derived from plants in the Lonchocarpus genus, known as ñeku in Wayãpi and Beku in Teko. One particular species was thus assigned the Latin taxonomical name Lonchocarpus nicou (initially Robinia nicou) by Aublet, who collected and named it with the help of Kali’na Indigenous Americans, who referred to it as nicou (Aublet, 1775). This phenomenon can be observed for many of the most emblematic Amazonian plants, testament to the transversality of Amazonian cultures: these peoples have mutually enriched one another, and far from existing as impermeable entities they are bound together by thousands of years of material, matrimonial, conflictual and linguistic exchanges, predating the changes brought about by colonisation.

Resituating the notion of biocultural heritage

33All of these reflections are to be framed within the context of the Nagoya Protocol and its implementation in France, and specifically French Guiana. International debates and agreements, along with the attention of politicians, have been focused primarily on the equitable sharing of the benefits derived from the utilisation of traditional knowledge. But we know from previous incarnations of these texts that they were originally concerned entirely with State ownership of biological resources, and have since been expanded – under pressure from indigenous militants and learned societies – to encompass local knowledge of biodiversity.

34We find ourselves faced with two radically different phenomena: biodiversity, and the knowledge pertaining to it. Protecting the former is often a matter of leaving it well alone, or at least using it selectively. The latter is a much less stable category, particularly where societies with predominantly oral traditions are concerned. Protecting this knowledge is a matter of taking all possible measures to keep it alive, and thus making it available for repeated access. As such, while it is possible to protect biodiversity by limiting access, we cannot hope to protect “associated knowledge” by stymieing its dissemination. Traditional knowledge only fades away if it is not used…

35The result is a form of hybrid knowledge, a combination of naturalist expertise and cultural features, practice and theory, which is poorly preserved. This may well be the heart of the problem. The inherently contradictory nature of the existing legal texts – which seek to protect phenomena which they strive to define, focusing instead on the sharing of the benefits they generate – requires us to imagine a new conceptual framework, existing at the intersection of natural and cultural heritage, tangible and intangible heritage: biocultural heritage (Maffi, 2018). Without this indispensable conceptual work, and without the creation of dedicated programmes of conservation and museum presentation, conservation stakeholders will remain locked in endless debate, and knowledge will continue to disappear along with those who hold it.

36In France, at time of writing, there is no institution allowing for the combined collection of biological taxa, their seeds, multimedia documents illustrating the knowledge and know-how associated with these taxa, and objects created by or associated with these practices. The situation elsewhere in Europe is scarcely any better. There are economic botany collections in the United Kingdom (Kew Gardens) and the United States (Missouri Botanical Garden), but these are only capable of meeting a tiny fraction of demand.

37The examples cited in this chapter are illustrative of simple, localised problems which provide examples of definitions running up against reality, specifically the vast diversity of natural knowledge among Amazonian societies. Groups whose recent history has been marked by geographical instability, such as the Galibi Marworno in Brazil, or the Ndjuka in Suriname, and now French Guiana, raise further questions. These groups are certainly Amerindians or Bushinenge, but some of them do not have French nationality. What laws apply to them? French law? Brazilian? Surinamese? While the species they use are undeniably found in Guianese territory, in some cases the knowledge they apply to them originates in their native country, where the biodiversity is largely identical… Perhaps, then, we should follow the UNESCO example and create a special status? In light of the shared history of our human societies, perhaps the notion of biocultural heritage of humanity, or global biocultural heritage, would be appropriate with regard to the recent concept of biocultural law (Collot, 2020).

Conclusion

38It now seems clear that our existing laws and implementing decrees, in the name of protecting biodiversity and associated knowledge, are in fact compromising conservation efforts and discouraging those who wish to study them. In these circumstances it is impossible to say “who benefits from this crime?” since – against all expectations, particularly in French Guiana – the legal texts ignore the position of the people who hold the knowledge. At no point do they consider the possibility of Amazonian perspectives on the living world, preferring to rely exclusively upon ethnocentric interpretations. In terms of Amazonian perspectivism, as studied by Viveiros de Castro (1998), all of these definitions of “biodiversity” are inconsistent. In Amazonia, relations between humans and non-humans are often viewed in terms of alliances, crises, family histories etc. Cognitive schemas which our legislators are powerless to transpose. To quote Pinton & Grenand (2007: 194): “When it comes to the conservation of biodiversity and associated knowledge, it is surely better to favour flexible approaches, to maintain forums for negotiation, to avoid enshrining the rights and duties of all parties in overly restrictive terms in the legislation, so that satisfactory compromises can be found.”

39Moving beyond the relatively narrow conceptual confines of natural and cultural heritage, the notion of biocultural heritage (tangible or intangible) makes sense, particularly since it is often impossible to separate the tangible from the intangible in some societies (Pinton & Grenand, 2007). Perhaps it is time to seriously consider recognising the shared biocultural heritage of humanity.

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